The story behind ‘Bhagya’ magazine run by Tamil film actor-director Bhagyaraj

While actively working in the Tamil film industry, actor-director K. Bhagyaraj also harboured a strong desire to run a weekly variety magazine. During the filming of Idhu Namma Aalu, he launched a variety magazine named Bhagya, appointing his friend Sanjeevi to manage its operations. The inaugural issue featured a photograph of his children on the cover.

The core objective of Bhagya was to entertain its readers. In line with this, the magazine featured simple modern poetry (Puthu Kavithaigal), short stories, and photo-caption commentaries. However, the most critical and successful feature of the magazine was its ‘Q&A section’.

Questions would pour in for this segment, where Bhagyaraj directly answered the queries of readers, recalls N.S. Nana, who served as the chief designer during the magazine’s initial days. “The director would arrive at the magazine office on Sundays specifically for the Q&A section. He would sift through the received questions to choose the ones that could be answered interestingly and would dictate the replies in his signature style. On certain occasions, he would already have some interesting anecdotes in mind, and questions would be tweaked to fit them,” says Mr. Nana.

Mr. Nana also notes that Bhagyaraj wrote the editorials for the magazine entirely by hand. Just as in his movies, some of the humour snippets published in this magazine were also adult-oriented. According to Mr. Nana, the magazine had a print run of approximately 1,00,000 copies during its initial days.